A Rebellious Heroine | Page 4

he saw life as it was.
"The mission of the novelist, my dear Professor," he had once been
heard to say at his club, "is not to amuse merely; his work is that of an
historian, and he should be quite as careful to write truthfully as is the
historian. How is the future to know what manner of lives we
nineteenth century people have lived unless our novelists tell the
truth?"
"Possibly the historians will tell them," observed the Professor of
Mathematics. "Historians sometimes do tell us interesting things."
"True," said Harley. "Very true; but then what historian ever let you
into the secret of the every-day life of the people of whom he writes?
What historian ever so vitalized Louis the Fourteenth as Dumas has
vitalized him? Truly, in reading mere history I have seemed to be
reading of lay figures, not of men; but when the novelist has taken hold
properly--ah, then we get the men."
"Then," objected the Professor, "the novelist is never to create a great
character?"
"The humorist or the mere romancer may, but as for the novelist with a
true ideal of his mission in life he would better leave creation to nature.
It is blasphemy for a purely mortal being to pretend that he can create a
more interesting character or set of characters than the Almighty has
already provided for the use of himself and his brothers in literature;
that he can involve these creations in a more dramatic series of events
than it has occurred to an all-wise Providence to put into the lives of
His creatures; that, by the exercise of that misleading faculty which the

writer styles his imagination, he can portray phases of life which shall
prove of more absorbing interest or of greater moral value to his
readers than those to be met with in the every-day life of man as he is."
"Then," said the Professor, with a dexterous jab of his cue at the
pool-balls--"then, in your estimation, an author is a thing to be led
about by the nose by the beings he selects for use in his books?"
"You put it in a rather homely fashion," returned Harley; "but, on the
whole, that is about the size of it."
"And all a man needs, then, to be an author is an eye and a type-
writing machine?" asked the Professor.
"And a regiment of detectives," drawled Dr. Kelly, the young surgeon,
"to follow his characters about."
Harley sighed. Surely these men were unsympathetic.
"I can't expect you to grasp the idea exactly," he said, "and I can't
explain it to you, because you'd become irreverent if I tried."
"No, we won't," said Kelly. "Go on and explain it to us--I'm bored, and
want to be amused."
So Harley went on and tried to explain how the true realist must be an
inspired sort of person, who can rise above purely physical limitations;
whose eye shall be able to pierce the most impenetrable of veils; to
whom nothing in the way of obtaining information as to the doings of
such specimens of mankind as he has selected for his pages is an
insurmountable obstacle.
"Your author, then, is to be a mixture of a New York newspaper
reporter and the Recording Angel?" suggested Kelly.
"I told you you'd become irreverent," said Harley; "nevertheless, even
in your irreverence, you have expressed the idea. The writer must be
omniscient as far as the characters of his stories are concerned--he must
have an eye which shall see all that they do, a mind sufficiently
analytical to discern what their motives are, and the courage to put it all
down truthfully, neither adding nor subtracting, coloring only where
color is needed to make the moral lesson he is trying to teach stand out
the more vividly."
"In short, you'd have him become a photographer," said the Professor.
"More truly a soulscape-painter," retorted Harley, with enthusiasm.
"Heavens!" cried the Doctor, dropping his cue with a loud clatter to the
floor. "Soulscape! Here's a man talking about not creating, and then

throws out an invention like soulscape! Harley, you ought to write a
dictionary. With a word like soulscape to start with, it would sweep the
earth!"
Harley laughed. He was a good-natured man, and he was strong enough
in his convictions not to weaken for the mere reason that somebody
else had ridiculed them. In fact, everybody else might have ridiculed
them, and Harley would still have stood true, once he was convinced
that he was right.
"You go on sawing people's legs off, Billy," he said, good-naturedly.
"That's a thing you know about; and as for the Professor, he can go on
showing you and the rest of mankind just why the shortest distance
between two points is in